The government proposes to offer all citizens [...] free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service.

Is this what we will have here in New Zealand? No, this is actually in India, where 1.1 billion people live on a rather large country.

The idea is to boost economic activity in general. The government of India plans to achieve free broadband connectivity at a speed of 2 Mb per second across the country, [with a similar goal]. Senior government officials expect to be able to achieve this goal spending only a portion of the corpus of the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).

All telecom operators contribute 5% of their revenues every year to USOF. It is estimated that the unutilised sum from the USOF has touched Rs 9,194.12 crore by March, 2007-end.

And here in New Zealand we are still fighting for a better infrastructure where a single dominant player has left the country's network behind the ages, impacting in the overall economical development. Let's see if things change when Telecom is split in three - one company just for network operations, separate from the others.

Note that this project includes peering, which is something we really need here in New Zealand:

The department of telecom (DoT) will be taking a series of steps to make its plans for free broadband a reality. These include, using the USOF to set an extensive optic cable network across the country, opening up the long-distance sectors to further competition, allowing free and fair access to cable landing stations, permitting the resale of bandwidth, setting up web hosting facilities within the country and asking all internet service providers to connect to the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI).

And do you think the following sounds familiar?

With international bandwidth rates in India being between two-to-five times higher than the global standards, the DoT will also go all out to break the monopoly of existing national and international distance players in a bid to induce cut throat competition in this sector. “India has only a handful of NLD/ILD operators while small countries such as Singapore and Taiwan have over 30 and 60 long distance operators respectively.